Bugs:Mario Kart Wii

This page details bugs of Mario Kart Wii.

Values Not Reset

The game has a pretty big oversight in that when entering a mode, certain flags are set to change the behavior of certain objects and other things. However, when exiting the mode, the flags are never reset, causing the changed behavior to carry over to other modes. There are a few different things you can do with this bug:

Bigger Character Icons

Normal	Big

There's a bug in the game's code that causes the minimap character icons to be bigger than they are intended. When playing a normal race, the icons are the normal size, unless you've played Time Trials. When the game launches, these icons are set to a specific scale. When playing Time Trials, these icons are made larger because the only other racer is the ghost. These icons aren't scaled back down when you quit Time Trials, so they remain a bigger size until the game is reset.

Battle's Nametag Draw Distance in VS Mode

In VS mode, nametags of players are only drawn when they are a certain distance to you, if they are too far then they will not be drawn to the screen. However, in Battle mode, the nametag draw distance will be greatly extended. If you enter a Battle, quit, and then enter a VS Race, the nametags will be drawn as if it was a Battle, which can help when playing competitively.

Battle's Quiet Item Warning Distance in VS Mode

In VS mode, when an opponent is using a powerful item (like a Star or Mega Mushroom) and the player is at a certain distance farther away (enough so that the loud sound variant doesn't play and the warning icon does not appear), then if said player looks back, a quiet variant of the warning sound can be heard. In Battle mode, the distance between the player and the opponent needed for this to happen will greatly increase. If you enter a Battle, quit, and then enter a VS Race, this characteristic will be present there as well.

Thwomp Desert Physics

The "Giant Pokey on Thwomp Desert" tournament actually sets flags that change how the sand physics work, and it no longer constantly pulls you inward. If you play this competition and then play Battle mode, the changed physics will carry over. This is particularly problematic for online play, as it could give quite a huge advantage. Luckily, this glitch could only be performed when the Giant Pokey tournament was the one currently running.

Blue Fake Item Box in Solo Races

If you enter a Team VS Race while on the Blue Team, then exit and go to a solo VS Race, your Fake Item Box will retain its blue color from the Team Mode. This is purely a visual bug and the item is still able to hit everyone in the race.

Mirror Startline Rotation Bug

Mario Kart Wii has a problem with the algorithm that rotates the startline on the minimap, where it will mirror incorrectly if the startline is at an angle that is not 90, 180, or 270 degrees. Every track has the startline rotated to one of these angles except for GCN DK Mountain, where you can see how the startline is misplaced.

(Source: Custom Mario Kart Wiiki)

Character Selection Screen T-Pose

When challenging a time trial ghost to a race (for instance, by challenging it on the Time Trial Rankings screen inside the Mario Kart Channel), the ghost character and vehicle will appear on the upper left part of the screen. On the first frame the character appears, said character will be in a T-Pose.

Character Stats Mixup

To do: Add this table to the page, as it shows the correspondence of the Mii character IDs and the stat slot ID.

There is a programming mistake in the code of the game that results in Miis being assigned the wrong stats. More specifically:

• Small Miis use Rosalina's intended stats, making both characters the only ones that use the same stats slot.
• Medium Miis use Small Mii's intended Stats.
• Large Miis use Medium Mii's intended character stats, which results in their programmed stats going unused since they're not assigned to any character at all in-game. Below is a table comparing the unused (intended) stats with the actual ones used in-game:

	Weight	Speed	Speed loss while steering without drifting (Manual only)	Standard Acceleration (A0)	Standard Acceleration (A1)	Drift Acceleration (A0)	Drift Acceleration (A1)	Handling (Manual)	Handling (Automatic)	Drift (Manual)	Drift (Automatic)	Miniturbo
Unused	0	0.53	0	0.025	0.035	0.09	0.01	0.000555	0.00029	0.000265	0.000222	0
Used	0.252	0.53	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	4

	Off-Road Speed (KCL 0x02)	Off-Road Speed (KCL 0x03)	Off-Road Speed (KCL 0x04)	Off-Road Speed (KCL 0x05)	Off-Road Rotation (KCL 0x01)	Off-Road Rotation (KCL 0x02)	Off-Road Rotation (KCL 0x03 and 0x04)	Off-Road Rotation (KCL 0x05)
Unused	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Used	0.0171	0.0184	0.0113	0.00641	0.00263	0.00368	0.00263	0.00211

This can be proven by modifying the character stats for Large Miis. Whatever changes made will not affect the character stats for Large Miis (nor any other character in the game).

Loading the unused Mii Outfit C shows a slightly different result: the male Miis using the outfit would follow this behavior, while the females would follow a separate pattern: Small and Medium would use their correct stats, while Large would use Rosalina's.

The way the game determines the stats slot to use for the Miis is by taking the slot for Small Mii (0x18) and adding either 0, 1, or 2 (depending if the Mii is small, medium, or large respectively) to that number. This way, the value obtained can be either 0x18, 0x19 or 0x1A (the stats slots for small, medium, and large Miis respectively). However, the instruction that does said operation in the code (located at 0x80592160 in RAM, EU) mistakenly assigns the slot for Small Mii as 0x17, hence the values obtained for each Mii weight are actually either 0x17, 0x18, or 0x19 (the stats slots for Rosalina, small, and medium Miis respectively).

In the case of Mii Outfit C, the game mistakenly assigns small, medium, and large Miis as if they were medium, large, and small respectively. This can be seen when the instruction at 0x80592148 (EU) is executed: the result of the operation (stored in register r4) is 1, 2, and 0 for each of the Mii weights. Similarly to what was mentioned above, this instruction at 0x80592140 (EU) operates with the immediate value of 0x17. Changing said value to 0x18 will fix the issue for Mii Outfit C, although the instruction mentioned in the paragraph above also has to be changed in order to fully fix the bug.

The following codes can be used to fix these oversights and play with the "intended" stats, including the unused Large Mii stats:

	EU	NA	JP	KR
Gecko Code	00592163 00000018 00592143 000000E8	0058B93F 00000018 0058B91F 000000E8	00591AE3 00000018 00591AC3 000000E8	005801BB 00000018 0058019B 000000E8

(Source: Custom Mario Kart Wiiki (1, 2), B_squo (technical explanation and codes))

Mii opponents having silent / Rosalina voice Bug

If playing in online mode as a Mii, then other Miis in the match will often have silent voices, or even use Rosalina's voice clips. This is a bug in the game's code, as the game won't setup the Mii opponents' voices if you're playing as a Mii.

Additionally, if two or more Mii opponents are in the match that should have the same voice (for instance, if they have the same color / weight / gender), then they will be assigned random voices. This appears to be intentional, but it can only happen when no human racer is playing as a Mii, due to the bug mentioned above.

The following Gecko code fixes the bug:

	EU	NA	JP	KR
Gecko Code	0486975C 4082001C	04864CD8 4082001C	04868DC8 4082001C	04857B1C 4082001C

(Source: B_squo)

Voices in Default Title Screen Bug

The default title screen (the one with Mario and Luigi) is not assigned to play any voice quote. However, when the game is completed, new title screen images will appear, and a voice can be heard depending on the character shown. If the player listens to one of these voices and then deletes all the licenses (so that the game will return to the default title screen), the last voice quote heard will play on top of that default screen, despite the fact that no voice quotes are assigned to it.

Monty Mole Scoring Bug

If a tournament/competition has the scoring objective set to hitting Monty Moles, the player will also score if they are hit by a Monty Mole. No tournaments appear to have this objective, however.

Missing Exhaust Pipe Fire

Sometimes it is possible to make the vehicles' exhaust pipes' fire disappear if a player holds a miniturbo, releases it, and dodges a Blue Shell right away by using a Mushroom. The effect of the bug only lasts through the duration of the boost, however.

Wrong Character Icon Shadow Orientation in Live Replay

To do: Get comparison images.

In online play, when watching a Live Replay, if the player switches perspectives with another racer, the shadow drop seen in its minimap icon will appear in the right hand side of it (similar to how it looks when looking at the results) instead of in the center as usual. This small bug will occur if the player switches the racer at least once, and after that it will persist until the race is over.

Rival Minimap Icons over Player's Icon

To do: Get comparison images.

Normally, the player's icon in the minimap has the priority over the rest of the minimap icons. However, this is not the case in Live view.

For example, if an opponent passes the player, the player's icon will still be seen in front of the opponent's icon. But on Live view, if the same thing happens, the opponent icon will be on top of the player's icon.

Non-Game-Breaking Backwards Driving

If you keep driving backwards in a race for two weeks (this can be done the quickest on SNES Ghost Valley 2 due to it being the shortest race track in the game), the lap counter will go above the limit of 3 laps. Interestingly, this will also result in Lakitu's normally-unused lap graphics being used.